Monthly Archive: May 2017

On his left, Antoine takes up the tale. “The thing is, the political class don’t listen to people like us. People call us extremists, but we just want someone who will make sure that the lights stay on and not do something stupid, like take us out of the European union. Beyond that -“, he shrugs, “I am relatively happy. This is a great time to be alive, isn’t it? I still have all my teeth. There is no war.”

The final man, François, chips in. “I remember the “good old days”. Merde! Did you know our service stations only gave up those toilets where it’s two footplates and a hole about 15 years ago?” He shakes his head. “I would like a little more globalisation, frankly.”

The waiter brings over more drinks. Tahar is in his 20s and a Muslim. He has a simple explanation for Macron’s triumph. “These Le Pen voters are trapped in a exurban nativist bubble. They are out of touch with the needs and values of real French people, like me.” He is right. There are deep forces at work here, which have caused the triumph of innumerable centrists around the western world over the past few decades. Only a blinkered fool would try to deny this uncomfortable truth. Perhaps, I begin to wonder with prickling unease, it is just as legitimate an electoral strategy to appeal to young people, ethnic minorities and social liberals as it is to go for the votes of nativist whites? I shake my head to clear it. No. Saying that would be like saying that there is no hierarchy of citizenhood, and that every voter is of equal value.

From: Deep in Macron Country

Khalid Zafrain came to the U.S. legally as a refugee from Sudan and helped federal agents break up a passport counterfeiting ring—a ring which helped a woman flee the U.S. after allegedly murdering her five-month-old baby.But despite his work as an informant, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport him.Zafrain is currently being held at the Farmville Detention Center in central Virginia, awaiting deportation proceedings. His story points to a broader challenge for immigration enforcers: As President Donald Trump pushes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to amp up deportations of immigrants convicted or suspected of crimes, ICE agents will increasingly rely on the immigrant community for help with their law enforcement mandate. And at a time when immigrants’ trust in ICE couldn’t be lower, the agency’s decision to try to deporting one of the few immigrants who actually helped them won’t make that any easier.

From: This ICE Informant Is About to Get Deported – The Daily Beast

Noonan called it.

Sometimes secrets are justifiable. But that seems only to be the case in a circumscribed sphere of knowledge. And—in the United States, at least—information remains classified for only so long before it becomes legally accessible to the average citizen and the press. This fact alone suggests an acknowledgement of certain short term risks associated with knowledge, while also admitting that over the long run we value knowledge over its absence or suppression. So, with these concessions in mind, let us further interrogate our intuition.

Would it be better not to know that the Earth orbits the sun? Before Copernicus revived the heliocentric hypothesis, widely accepted by ancient Greek philosophers, Europeans in Christendom could reasonably assume that they were the center of the solar system. Galileo’s observations helped rob us of this comforting myth. Clear thinking clergy at the time certainly guessed what the consequences might be. The leader of the most powerful religious organization on the planet, the Pope, felt that we would all be better off not knowing. At play was a moral calculus intended to sort out whether certain knowledge might be dangerous. In this case, it might cause people to lose their faith (or erode the power of the church, somehow). Of course, the heretics were correct about our place in the solar system. But the rumor of civilization’s great moral demise was vastly overstated.

We may have lost our centrality to the universe, but we retained our special stature as beings created in the image of the Almighty. In 1859, however, that changed too. Charles Darwin upset our intuitions in a way most people still haven’t fully grasped. Darwin understood the subversive consequences of his theory clearly, which partly explains why he waited so long to publish his book on evolution by natural selection, and why he confided to his friend Joseph Hooker that it was like “confessing to a murder” to show that species are not immutable, and that evolution is not a synonym for progress.

From: Is It Ever Better Not to Know? | Quillette

Knowing that Macron went through certain kinds of hell to win his happiness makes it all the more interesting—moving, even—to see him emerging as a powerful champion of the modern family in its many...

Germany’s top prosecutor Tuesday said two soldiers and an accomplice plotted high-profile assassinations that would be blamed on a migrant, escalating a controversy over right-wing extremism in the military that is weighing on the...

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a robotic system that built the basic structure of a building in less than 14 hours. The dome-like structure is 50 feet in diameter and 12 feet high.

The prototype is essentially a vehicle with a large industrial robotic arm for reach, and a smaller arm for dexterity. Different tools can be attached to the smaller arm, such as a welding system or a spray head that shoots out building materials like foam.

“With this process, we can replace one of the key parts of making a building, right now. It could be integrated into a building site tomorrow,” said Steven Keating, co-author of a paper published in the journal “Science Robotics.”

From: New MIT robot can 3D print entire building structure in less than 14 hours – May. 2, 2017